Tools

Conference Presentations

The combination of microservice architectures and continuous delivery (CD) create a difficult scenario for integration and release testing. Even though microservices often introduce a huge number of integrations and transitive dependencies, testing still must be completed quickly to keep the pipeline flowing smoothly. Robert Williams surveys the techniques and tools available today for testing one or more microservices against a mix of real and virtualized dependencies in various stages of the CD pipeline. He explores structured testing around multiple versions of those services and their dependencies. Robert demonstrates semantic versioning and a console for traffic shaping so you can specify a range of versions of microservice dependencies and automatically test the candidate service against a range of real or virtualized dependencies.

Although Selenium has become the open source standard for simulating user interactions with the browser, Andrew Krug likes to think of it as more than one tool in your toolbelt. Andrew says Selenium is like the Craftsman Bolt-On tool—with one battery and one grip, it can become a circular saw, drill, jig saw, or even a tire inflator. He’ll cover thirty or more Selenium hacks in this fast-paced session. Find out how you can employ Selenium for security testing, visual testing, email testing, easy content testing, performance testing, load testing … you get the drift. Briefly touching on each Selenium hack, Andrew has one goal for this session: for all participants to learn one thing that they can use immediately upon return to their workplace. As a bonus, all code covered in this presentation will be put up on GitHub.

Selenium has been the cure for free and low-cost browser testing for years, and—in the world of agile, mobile, DevOps, and browserless interfaces—it is showing its age. Comparing Selenium to what’s coming, Jason Arbon says that machine learning and data analytics will become the new standard for test automation. With Selenium, test engineers suffer from the pains of broken element identification; broken, buggy, and partially implemented mobiletest capabilities; exploding costs of building abstraction layers on their apps; brittle test code when the application under test changes; and absence of any context or test logic in the framework. Jason unwraps the work that several startups and projects initiated in the past twenty-four months are actively doing to fix these issues with new general-purpose, test frameworks that combine machine learning and data analytics.

MindMapping is a general technique of organizing your thoughts, aligning your ideas, and breaking things down. It’s uses are, in fact, mind blowing. But in this session, join Bob Galen, as he takes you on a visual tour of mindmapping as applied in the software testing space. We’ll be using a free tool and be creating maps to illustrate test case design, test idea generation, sprint-level test planning, and release-level test planning using mindmaps. Along the way, you’ll also gain some new insights into risk-based testing with an agile twist, as we explore the 3-Amigos metaphor. You’ll leave this session with a rudimentary library of maps and another, quite powerful tool, to add to your toolbox. Bring your laptop or other device, as we’ll be using MindMup to create a few simple mindmaps.

Ken Johnston sees today’s software ecosystem in the light of Everything as a Service (EaaS). Operating systems like Windows, Android, and Chrome OS all ship regularly like a service. Browsers automatically update every few weeks, and apps are constantly updating through all the app stores. Although getting a test to pass once and signing off has gone by the wayside for software testing, still we run test cases over and over again. Ken shares how Microsoft took millions of test cases—yes, actually millions—and turned the important ones into measures based on real world telemetry. Massive amounts of data coming in from real devices and real users measure product quality and tie it to key customer satisfaction metrics.

Our world is changing. Artificial intelligence is being employed in many walks of life—from virtual assistants and robots to self-driving cars. How does this new way of life impact software testing? What is our role … and will we have one in the future? Of course! And it’s a very exciting time to be in testing because there’s not enough known about how to systematically test these AI- and ML-driven applications. Angie Jones gives an overview of why it’s extremely important that we comprehensively test these applications and how today’s tester can prepare and build the skillset for this new realm of software. While the future of artificial intelligence is mostly a mystery, one of testers’ strongest and most valuable assets is the ability to discover and report the unknown.

Are you looking for new ways to invigorate your teams? Do retrospectives seem stale? Do story breakdown meetings feel flat? On the other hand, maybe your teams are humming and you’re looking for additional variety. The research is clear—movement matters, and play stimulates creativity.

When dealing with complicated and ever-growing program conditions brought on by new business requirements, it's easy for what was once a small conditional block of code to grow to evaluating hundreds of unique conditions. Unfortunately, much like kudzu, that bad practice begins to creep...

Starting October 2-3 you can live stream all 5 keynotes, select sessions, speaker interviews and chat along with other virtual attendees. Register now and mark your calendar to join us live or on-demand after the event.